Years before, when Heather had left to join the army, Tom had said he didn’t want to see her again. He’d meant it.
“She’s back,” I said. There was no good way to tell him what had happened, no way to ease into the subject.
“Who’s back?” he mumbled, still absorbed in his magazine.
“She’s finished her active duty.”
He put the magazine in his lap and stared at me, confused.
“She came to the VA today,” I said.
“She just showed up?”
Down in the yard, Buster ran across the grass. Mr. Yiu stood by the fence in his sweatpants and T-shirt, waiting for the dog. Mr. and Mrs. Yiu had children and grandchildren in Fremont who came over on weekends, and they had brothers and sisters and parents and friends who joined them every Saturday night for mah-jongg. The room where they played was next to our bedroom; late into the night we’d hear the tiles slapping the table, the loud, happy voices, the Chinese opera they played on a very old tape deck.
I often envied the liveliness of that house. Ours had once been lively, too—when we had Ethan. The sweet, incessant chatter, the playdates, the songs. In those days, the stereo was always on; Tom and I both wanted Ethan to grow up in a house filled with music.
For years, Mrs. Yiu had been urging me to have a child. First, she wanted me to have one for Ethan. “He needs little brother,” she would insist. And then, she wanted me to have one for myself. “You are too sad. A baby makes everyone happy.” And for years, I had been assuring her that I was trying.
“I walked into the cafeteria,” I told Tom, “and she was there.”
He lifted his knees, dragging the covers with him, leaving me exposed. “The nerve of her, showing up like that.”
I tugged the covers back. “She seemed different.”
“Don’t tell me you’re giving her the benefit of the doubt,” he shot back.
“You haven’t even heard the story,” I said, irritated. These days, we were so much quicker to set each other off. Even I didn’t entirely understand why I suddenly felt the need to defend my sister. Was it the baby? Did the fact that she was carrying my niece or nephew change everything?
“Anyway, she’s pregnant.”
He shook his head, scowling. “Perfect. The poster child for maternal instincts. Is she married?”
“No.”
“So what’s she here for? Money?”
“She hasn’t asked for anything,” I said defensively. “Think what you will about her, she was never like that.”
When Heather left, it had been easy to draw the lines of loyalty—to side with my husband instead of the sister whose recklessness had cost us so much. But in the intervening years, the ties between Tom and me had begun to fray. We were both quicker to anger, more prone to argue over small things. Between his work and mine, we spent less time together. For both of us, losing Ethan—the child who came to us so unexpectedly—had been devastating. Afterward, when we tried and failed, again and again, to have a child, I felt a drowning sense of hopelessness. Tom weathered my infertility much better than I did. Over the years, his attempts to console me—“We’re fine just the two of us,” he would say, or “A baby wouldn’t replace Ethan”—had only made me feel that he didn’t understand the depth of my desire.
“Listen, Jules, your sister wants something. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here. You can’t let her into our life. She’ll just fuck things up. That’s Heather’s talent. It’s what she does.”
He pulled me toward him and started kissing me. On the radio, Tom could talk and talk. But at home, when it came to the stuff we really needed to discuss, he had a habit of stopping conversations before they really started. And I was an easy target. It was too easy to retreat into the familiar comfort of sex, too easy to save the argument for some later date.
If I’d been more honest with him, I might have said, “It was all fucked up already. Before she came back, we’d already fucked it up.” I might have asked, “Are we going to make it?” But I didn’t, because we were on our ship. This was where we were good together, the best. This was where we never faltered. It was a good place to pretend.
But the following night, I turned on the radio at the usual time, just to hear Tom’s voice. “Here’s the Mendoza Line,” he said, “with ‘Love on Parole.’ ” The lyrics were sadly fitting, and I couldn’t help but feel that this was his way of telling me something he wouldn’t say outright:
And for all your talk of ending the fray,
There’s not a part of your heart that would have it that way.
Oh, ya couldn’t make a cup of tea
Without a battle strategy.
Four months later, I came home from work one night to find Tom sitting on the end of our bed, one sock on, one sock off, his suitcase already packed.
“What’s this?” I asked, thinking he had a business trip I’d forgotten about.
I’d stripped off my work clothes and was searching in my dresser drawer for sweatpants, debating whether to cook or to order pizza, when he said, “I can’t do it anymore.”
I turned to him, half-dressed, certain I’d heard him wrong. “What?”
“I found a place to stay,” he said.
Things hadn’t been good between us; that was no secret. Things, in fact, had been very difficult. Heather’s arrival had only made things worse. But in all our endless arguments, we’d never talked about this. Not really.
“It’s a six-month lease,” he said. “I think we both need some time to figure out what we’re doing here.”
“What we’re doing here?” I repeated, incredulous. “This is how you talk about the last fifteen years of our lives—what we’re doing here?”
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
I went over to the bed, knelt beside him, and shook him as hard as I could by the shoulders. He closed his eyes as if to completely block me out of his sight. “Look at me!” I said.
“Getting angry isn’t going to help matters,” he said, so calmly I wanted to scream.
I let go of his shoulders and collapsed on the bed beside him. I was stunned. “That’s it? No discussion? You just go out and find yourself a new place. You just make this decision for the both of us.”
“I’m sorry.” He was; I could see it on his face. He was sorry and he was scared, and yet, he had already decided to do it—to make a trial run of life without me.
“You can’t do that.” I felt the tears running down my face, and I was ashamed to be falling apart in front of him when, instead, I should have been making my case in a calm, rational way. I’d never been a crier. In fact, it was one thing Tom had liked about me in the beginning, the fact that, with me, there was no emotional roller coaster, everything an even keel. It came with the profession. I considered it a good quality.
He seemed confused by my tears. He reached out and patted my hand, as if he were consoling a casual acquaintance. It was too much. I started pounding on his chest with my fists. He grabbed my wrists and held them so easily, like a parent restraining an angry child.
“I’m sorry, Jules,” he repeated. “I really am. But you can’t pin this all on me. I’m just the one who pulled the trigger. If you think about it, you’ll realize that someone had to. Something had to give.”
I stopped fighting and pulled my wrists away. In my bra and underwear, I suddenly felt naked. I got up from the bed and reached for the first thing I could find to cover myself—the sweatshirt he’d been wearing that day, which lay crumpled on the floor. Downstairs in the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator, closed it. Pizza, I decided. I’ll call Victoria’s. I couldn’t think any further than that. There were plenty of questions I wanted to ask my husband, but, deep down, I already knew the answers.
It wasn’t working out; on this point, Tom was right. But when it came to his physical absence from my life, it turned out I was totally unprepared. The morning after he moved out, I made coffee and sat in bed, listening for the neighbor calling in his d
og. The door opened, the dog’s leash clinked, a few minutes passed. “Buster boy,” Mr. Yiu finally cried. “Buster boy.” I closed my eyes and let the sound wash over me, relieved to still have this.
I missed Tom far more than I’d expected. The simplest things were the most difficult to let go of: the sound of his boots on the stairs when he came home in the morning, the fact that he always knew which movies were playing and what new albums I might want to hear, the musky-sweet smell of his skin, the great, easy sex. The one thing I didn’t miss was the fighting.
“God, Julie,” Heather said when I told her he was gone. “I’m sorry. I hope it didn’t have anything to do with me.”
“We’ve been moving in this direction for a long time.” What I didn’t say was that her sudden presence in our lives had exacerbated an already impossible situation.
“Well, looks like you’re losing a hot hunk of a husband and gaining a big fat barn of a sister.”
She meant it as a joke, but she was more right than she could know. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. With Tom, I’d made a vow. Heather was the one who’d taken Ethan away from us, and Tom was the one who’d seen me through that loss. He was my partner, the one I had chosen, the one who had chosen me. Heather and I were born to each other, the way you’re born to a country: an imposed allegiance. Between a marriage one chooses and a blood relation one doesn’t, shouldn’t marriage be the more powerful bond?
15
“Tell me something,” Dennis says. “If California secedes, where will you go?”
“I won’t go anywhere. California is home.”
“You can’t stay at the VA hospital if there’s no VA in California.”
“I’ll find another hospital.”
His voice grows angry. “Then how will I see you?”
Heather is lying on the bed. She rises up, her face contorted, her skin alarmingly pale. She bears the contraction silently. I rub her shoulder the same way I did when she was little; I wish there was more I could do for her.
“I’m not that hard to find,” I tell Dennis.
“We used to be such good friends.”
Heather drops back on the pillow, trembling. “We’re still friends,” I say impatiently.
“Then why do you avoid me? Why don’t you return my calls?” There’s something frightening in his tone.
“I’m sorry, Dennis. I’ll try to do better. I promise.”
For several seconds, he says nothing.
“Just let Eleanor go,” I say. “Let her get medical attention. You don’t need an injured person on your hands.”
He’s silent. I resist the urge to fill the silence.
“You’re right,” he says brokenly. “I really don’t.”
For a moment, it seems as though I might be getting through to him.
“Anyway, Eleanor is a pain in the ass,” he says. “She’s always been a pain in the ass. Wouldn’t you agree?”
How do I respond? The truth is, he’s right. Eleanor seems to thrive on making life difficult for others. If you ask her a simple question, you never get a straight answer. She’s unkind to patients, surly with staff. She makes fun of the doctors in front of the residents and tattles on the residents to the doctors. And she’s not just unpleasant; she’s downright incompetent. It’s the catch-22 of government work. No matter how bad an employee is, you can’t get rid of them. You just keep shuffling them around. The only reason she was working the hotel desk this morning was that having her in the hospital lobby was too demoralizing; a few weeks ago, having rotated her through practically every department of the hospital, HR finally found the place where they thought she would see the fewest people and, therefore, do the least damage.
“In fact,” Dennis says, “it’s not unreasonable to assume that the world would be better off without Eleanor.”
There’s a thud in the background. Then a woman shrieks and begins sobbing.
“What’s happening, Dennis?” I ask, frightened.
“Eleanor is always yapping; now I’m giving her a reason to.”
I hear Rajiv’s voice. “Please put the gun down,” he says calmly.
“You haven’t hurt anyone yet,” I say desperately. “Dennis—we can still resolve this.”
“I know we can. Me and you. Eleanor’s just getting in the way. It’s almost like you care more about her than you care about me.”
“That’s not true. I care about you very much.”
“Then you won’t mind what I’m about to do. This will be a favor for you—remember what a pain in your ass Eleanor used to be when you were both working the second floor?”
A chill goes through me.
“Dennis, wait—”
“No!” It’s Betty’s voice.
A deafening sound comes through the line, so loud I instinctively jerk the phone away from my ear.
“There,” Dennis says. “No more talk about Eleanor. She has wasted enough of our time.”
16
After that Wednesday in October when Heather walked back into my life, we didn’t see each other for several days. She’d been vague about where she was staying, but she promised to meet me in the cafeteria again the following Wednesday.
Meanwhile, I braced myself for the possibility that she wouldn’t be back. I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby. I fantasized about holding it, rocking it to sleep, feeding it bottles, carrying it through the city in a sling, its warm body snug against me. It was a leap, I knew, one that assumed so many things: that Heather would decide to have the baby, that she would remain nearby, and that she would allow me to be involved.
So when I walked into the VA cafeteria on the scheduled day and saw her sitting there, fifteen minutes early, I sighed with relief.
I slid into the booth across from her. “Since when are you a morning person?”
She folded up her paper. “There’s a lot you wouldn’t recognize about me. On the forward operating base in Kandahar, we had to be up at five. It’s amazing what you can accomplish in a day if you get up with the sunrise.”
The army. Of course. It was the same answer she would give over the next few weeks for so many fundamental changes: her disciplined exercise routine, her orderly finances, her complete sobriety. I’d heard different variations on the same theme from my patients. Aimless or troubled kids who went into the army because it was their last option and found peace and purpose in the intense drills, the set-in-stone hierarchy of command, the unrelenting requirements for the maintenance of one’s uniform, work station, and living quarters. During the years of her aimlessness, I’d thought what Heather needed was a college education, a career path, and a steady relationship. It turned out that what she needed was more drastic and far more simple: orders to follow, a clear path set by someone else, a purpose beyond herself.
“It’s weird,” she said. “Growing up, I imagined a totally different life. When everything happened, I had to get away, I had to do something extreme. I remember walking down Sloat trying to figure out what to do. I looked up and saw the army recruiting office. I didn’t even think. I just went inside. It seemed like a sign.”
By “everything,” I knew she really meant one thing. She meant Ethan. Of all the conversations I wanted to have with my sister, I wasn’t ready to have that one. Not yet. After all these years, the pain still felt too raw.
“I’ve got a few minutes,” I said instead. “Want to walk?”
When she stood up, my gaze instinctively went to her stomach.
“You’re real subtle.” She patted her belly. “Yes, the creature is still in here.”
“Does Mom know?”
“Lord, no. She’d have her whole church praying for me.”
I opened the back door of the cafeteria, and the salt air hit our faces, cool and sweet. I thought of the baby, growing day by day, a tiny collection of supercharged cells that might one day be my niece or nephew.
When I looked at Heather, if I pushed the scrim of my anger aside, I still saw the infant girl in m
y arms, the toddler stepping out into the street half a second before I reached forward and pulled her back, the eighth grader weeping about a boy who’d kissed her at the Fourth of July fireworks and then ignored her, the teenager who called me to bail her out of jail after she got caught with marijuana, the college student who flunked out freshman year and was too scared to tell our mother, the young woman who always had some ill-advised boyfriend who didn’t treat her well and some crappy job that didn’t pay enough. The years of too much drinking and too many drugs. Things had never gone right for her; she had never been happy. Now maybe she could be.
Heather and I took the Battle of the Bulge trail again, through the blackberry vines and over the footbridge, down and down until we reached the wider Lands End path, with its grand views out toward the sea. She told me about a Christina Aguilera concert she’d attended on the base, and in the same breath, she told me about the terrible aftermath of a roadside bombing. “All of it runs together,” she said. “It’s hard to remember what came first.” She told me about a friend who had died when he jumped off the back of a truck and broke his femur. “His femur,” she said, incredulous. “A perfectly healthy twenty-five-year-old with a wife and baby at home. The break sent an embolism to his heart.” She shook her head. “I spent seven months sitting in Suwayrah playing Xbox and reading novels and practically peeing in my pants every time I heard an explosion. The place was a magnet for incoming rocket fire. The one bright spot was the food. We had Pakistani civilians cooking for us. They were amazing. I talked this one guy into giving me his recipe for Lahori beef karahi. You’ll have to come over one of these days so I can cook it for you.”
“Come over?”
“I’ve decided to stick around. A friend of mine is letting me borrow his place in the Mission while he’s back East.” She glanced up to gauge my reaction. “You don’t look too thrilled.”
“I’m glad you’re safe,” I said. “I really am. But you can’t expect everything to just magically go back to how it was.”
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